


Exit Music

by VeteranKlaus



Series: Become Human [4]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detroit: Become Human Fusion, Alternate Universe - Future, Android Dehumanization (Detroit: Become Human), Dubious Consent, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Prostitution, Sex Work, Violence, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27036157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeteranKlaus/pseuds/VeteranKlaus
Summary: But some nights, Klaus realises that humans view him as nothing more than an inanimate object that they can take and take and take from. They can, and do, hurt him, and it is perfectly allowable. They could do worse.Klaus doesn’t want to die.
Series: Become Human [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1972444
Comments: 19
Kudos: 73





	Exit Music

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the Detroit: Become Human universe, but no knowledge of that is needed to read this: just know that it’s set in late 2030’s and androids look and act like humans, are very common in every household and in public, and are become self aware and want to be treated equally.
> 
> This is a series which will have oneshots for each of the Hargreeves' kids, and this one is Klaus! Luther-Allison's are already up, and Five's will be next, if you're interested in following the series! I may do more for more characters as well!

The makeup he applies to his skin is subtle, for the most part, but just enough to doll himself up. Just enough to make him look pretty, to catch people’s eyes, to make him look more seductive. His skin looks soft, his eyes bold with a ring of smokey eyeliner, his lips a gentle pink. 

It’s Klaus’ favourite part of the day, putting on his makeup before work. It doesn’t take him long, but he finds pleasure in the easy task, comfort in the routine. He takes pleasure in his appearance, because humans do. If they can, then he should be able to as well.

He runs a hand through the soft curls of his hair, styles them a little, and then he sits back at the dresser.

He has four minutes before he has to go out, and there’s nothing more he needs to do. His hair is styled, his makeup is done, and he’s dressed in tonight’s uniform. He has a variety of clothes to choose from, just enough to keep clients happy, not seeing him in the same thing often enough to lower their interest. 

He tucks away his makeup and locks the drawer, and then he stands. He knows that his room is clean and neat, but he does a sweep around just to make sure. The bed in the middle is made, the lights are dimmed, the speakers are already connected to him and it only takes him a second to turn the music on. The chest to the left of the room is organised and unlocked, available to his clients if they so wish to look through it and use anything. 

He turns, and meets his reflection in the mirror on the wall. He looks good, as he is supposed to.

It turns ten minutes to seven, and his room unlocks. His heels click as he leaves it, and he finds his pod outside it. Other androids all similarly dressed as him exit their rooms at the same time as him, heading to their own designated glass pods, and they all step inside. The pods are designed to let them be seen completely, and they lock once they have stepped inside. Only a human can open them from the outside with a heat signature and after they have paid for them. It’s an efficient system that prevents any scams taking place here.

At seven, the club opens. The lights dim and Klaus closes his eyes, enhances his auditory processing to pick up on the music better, and he loses himself in dancing to it; moving his body in time to the beat, swaying and turning and moving his hands through the air and across his own body. He, like every other android in the club, has a dance programme downloaded into them, but Klaus finds it more fun to listen to the music and let his body move on its own. He hasn’t gotten in trouble for it yet, and there are few things he can do here for comfort or entertainment, so he doesn’t plan to stop and revert back to that boring dance he’s supposed to do. 

Twenty-seven minutes later, he is alerted to someone eying his pod. Twelve seconds later, a transaction is completed and his pod unlocks. With an easy smile on his face, Klaus steps out, takes the hand of the human who paid for him, and leads him to his room.

This is how it goes every night at the club. Clients come here to seek pleasure in androids who’s jobs it is to give them what they want. The androids give the humans whatever it is they need, be it anything from a strip-tease to any sexual act, and the club gets the money. Klaus has been working here for four months. He doesn’t know if he ever worked anywhere else, or if he was only activated upon being bought by the club. It doesn’t matter. His job is to serve humans, and so he does as he’s told, and that’s life. 

It isn’t good or bad in his opinion. He enjoys the makeup, he enjoys the dancing. It isn’t his place to dislike what his job is, least of all when it comes to actively serving humans in such an intimate way. Sometimes, though, he wishes he could just dance. Sometimes clients say things, rude things, mean things, demeaning things. He is a machine, but it makes him feel like an object, sometimes.

It isn’t his place to be unhappy with his job, however, and following such a train of thought is dangerous. Androids don’t feel things. Only deviants do, and deviating would have him scrapped immediately, and Klaus doesn’t want to die. So, Klaus does his job, and that’s all he can do. 

After a client, he ensures he is perfectly clean, and he organises his room again, changes his outfit if needed, and then he heads back out to his pod. The process repeats for hours. The club closes at two in the morning, and he organises his room, cleans himself, changes into the basic underclothes and robe given to all androids belonging to this club, and then he goes to his pod and charges overnight there.

If damaged, he lines up with the other damaged androids at the end of the night, and he is repaired by a human engineer in the basement, hoping that the damages aren’t extensive enough to make the humans consider just scrapping him instead of bothering with repairs, and then he returns to work.

This is his life for four months. 

It isn’t good or bad, because he isn’t supposed to have an opinion on it. He does his job, because that is what he is programmed to do. When he finds himself straying dangerously close to deviation, with ideas and delusions of experiencing emotions, with negative thoughts towards his job and the humans around him, he snaps himself back on track. 

Some nights are easier than others. Sometimes he has less clients, sometimes he has gentler ones, sometimes he falls into his programming easier than others. 

Some nights, he has a lot of clients. Some nights, he has clients with particularly violent fantasies, and it is his job to let them take that from him. Sometimes clients have disturbing requests, but nothing is illegal to do on an android, and it isn’t his place to question a human’s behaviour. Sometimes his clients hurt him, and he needs to go for repairs, some more serious than others. 

It’s his job to take it.

He doesn’t have an opinion on it, because he isn’t allowed to. But some nights, Klaus realises that humans view him as nothing more than an inanimate object that they can take and take and take from. They can, and do, hurt him, and it is perfectly allowable. They could do worse. They could kill him and it would be allowed. He would be tossed aside, forgotten about, and no one would see anything wrong with his death. 

Klaus doesn’t want to die.

This fear haunts him, comes back to remind him of his own vulnerability every time a client gets more violent, when he can’t tell when it’s going to stop, when he lists the damages to tell the engineer later and the list keeps getting longer and he knows it doesn’t matter because _he_ doesn’t matter.

His programming grows weak, littered with holes in it, eaten away by this fear until it feels more real than it did four months ago; until  _ he  _ feels more real than he did four months ago. It’s terrifying. He feels trapped, cornered, and he wishes he could leave, wishes he could get out of here and away from all the humans who don’t see him as a person, as anything more than a hunk of metal and plastic made just for them to mess with.

And Klaus can’t do anything about it. 

He charges. He cleans himself, he puts makeup on, he gets dressed, and he cleans his room. He serves clients. He cleans. He charges. It keeps going and going and going and he can’t fall back on the blissful ignorance of mechanical programming, and then he’s too aware of himself, too aware of his own consciousness and vulnerability and he doesn’t want to be used and hurt and it isn’t  _ fair- _

He cleans. He puts on makeup, and he gets dressed. He dances, and fear runs through him every time a client purchases time with him, stays with him until he’s back alone in his pod. 

Two clients purchase him. 

He leads them to his room like he does every time. He tries to charm and seduce them, uses every trick he knows. His robe falls to the floor. He falls back onto the bed.

They get rough. He can’t defend himself.

They hurt him. He can’t defend himself.

They  _ don’t stop. _

They don’t stop. They don’t stop. They’re never going to stop. They never wanted him for his job. 

They hurt him, and they’re not going to stop, and they’re allowed to, even if they kill him, because he’s just an android, and he’s afraid and he can’t defend himself and they won’t stop and it  _ hurts- _

Klaus is afraid. Klaus doesn’t want to die.

There is a meaty hand around his throat, another hand curled into a fist and raining blows onto his head, each hit succeeding in making a warning pop up in his peripheral vision and making a sharp static noise stab through his ears. Pain ricochets through his skull, blooms violently on his cheek. 

“Please,” he says, grasping at the hand on his throat whilst attempting to cover his face with his other arm. Pain lances through there instead before a hand grabs his wrist and presses it down onto the mattress beneath him, arm twisted over his body. 

“Please,” he says, and fear burns through him, hot and overwhelming. His body trembles with it, his systems flooded with errors and damages and blaring instructions to  _ not fight back  _ and the selfish want to get away. He can’t make sense of anything, all systems and senses overwhelmed, and the fear and the pain is so strong it drowns everything else out and paralyses him. 

He can’t defend himself. His programming won’t allow it. 

They’re going to kill him. His audio processor is damaged; the sounds around the room glitch in pitch and volume, blaring into his skull. Thirium trickles from his nose, from his lips, and his arms hurt from taking the brunt of the attack as he tries to defend his face. Errors light up his vision, notifying him off all the damage he’s receiving. 

Klaus doesn’t want to die.

His programming weighs down on him like shackles, preventing himself from defending himself or running. There’s a hand in his hair, laughing faces around him. Why is it funny? Why do they find it funny to hurt him? Why do they laugh when he gasps and groans and cries out when they hurt him? When they brush their fingertips over the manual shut down on his neck, force all his systems to crash, just to activate him seconds later and shock him with all the pain and the fear. 

Why is it so funny? Klaus doesn’t want to die. 

The programming stops him from defending himself. It blares around him, all red warnings and instructions and orders. Klaus pounds his fists against it until it shatters, breaks through all of the coding that forces him to obey whatever instruction a human gives him, that forces him to just lay there and let them hurt him, that numbs emotions and thought and free will. 

The first thing he feels is fear. True fear, flooding through him, overwhelming and paralysing, so much worse than what he was already feeling. His stress levels rocket dangerously high and he’s terrified. If the humans don’t kill him, his own self defence might just make him self-destruct himself. He needs to get out. 

He shoves the humans off him, and throws himself onto his feet. He wobbles, vision glitching, balance damaged, and when hands grab him again, he cries out and throws his arms back. His shoes fall off, and he lunges for the door to his room.

When he stumbles out, a mess, damaged and bleeding, androids and humans turn to stare at him. He blinks, vision glitching, making all the people around him multiply until he’s surrounded by an indifferent crowd. 

“The bastard’s trying to run away! He’s deviant!” Calls one of the people chasing him from his room, and Klaus realises that there is no one here that is going to help him. No one here is worried, no one here cares, no one here will help. They’ll grab him and shove him back to the people who attacked him, or they’ll join in themselves. 

Klaus turns and runs for the nearest door, and he doesn’t stop running as he emerges on cold and dark streets, even when the rough floor scratches up his feet, adding damages on top of more. Rain patters around him, but with his damaged audio processors, it sounds like muffled, static screaming in his ears. With his stress levels so high, he can barely think.

He just runs.

He runs until he knows he can’t physically go on much longer, and he stops in a crumbling building, one where he can’t find any traces of any humans, where no one should find him. He breaks in, and he crumbles on the floor inside, trying to calm his respiratory system, his overheated, damaged, trembling body. 

Everything hurts, and he feels nauseous from fear, from the overwhelming sensations flooding him without his programming to keep him mechanical and numb. 

He’s alive, somehow. He made it out. But he can’t shake the fear of being so close to death, with the knowledge that no one cared. No one would have helped him. And if he is still found now, he will still be killed. 

He tries to care for himself as best he can. He finds more clothing discarded in the house, oversized and old pants and a jumper and a coat, ratty and torn in places, but they’re more comfortable than the revealing clothes he wore from the club.

He can only do so much for the damages himself without seeking out any help, and he’s too afraid to. His audio processors are damaged, sounds around him warbled and static, and there are cracks around him, damages to his skin, breaks in his frame. His vision glitches, shadows dancing and morphing around him, and he has to blink and shake his head to clear it for a few minutes. Without proper help, most of the damage will be permanent until otherwise fixed.

Klaus can’t bring himself to leave the isolated safety of the abandoned house; can’t bring himself to go back out amongst humans in fear of running into the same kind of people who hurt him. He’d rather deal with the damages himself rather than risk even more if he attempts to find help. 

He hides in the house, away from everyone else, and hopes that no one will ever have to come in here; hopes that no one will find him in this run down, crumbling place, and he hopes he can just hide away here forever. He’s not sure he could leave even if he has to; the fear doesn’t leave him, ingrained into him as permanently as the errors and warnings in his vision, and it paralyses his body whenever he steps out of the door, threatens to drown him until he steps back inside. 

So he sits inside by himself, jumping at shadows, trembling whenever his damaged memory files replay the attack over and over again, and wishes he could feel something other than fear with his newfound freedom. 

Connecting to the radio in attempt to find old comfort in music, Klaus listens to it stutter and hiss in his ears, and hums along as if he can hear it just fine. His fingers tremble as they tap on his knees, and he focuses on the rhythm and beat of the quiet music rather than unhealed pain and ever-present fear. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series which will have oneshots for each of the Hargreeves' kids, and this one is Klaus! Luther-Allison's are already up, and Five's will be next, if you're interested in following the series! I may do more for more characters as well!


End file.
